My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [12]
After our failure to get the North Korean deli, a kind of gloom settles over Kay’s normally frenetic household. Over the previous few months we’d seen thirty or forty stores; now we stopped looking, except for Salim’s deli.
Gab and Kay go into Brooklyn one day and come back from looking at Salim’s store with mixed feelings.
“It was the size of a two-car garage, yet inside it seemed even smaller,” says Gab.
“It was very dirty, very bad condition, but it had lots of customers,” says Kay.
Was it a loser store? Judging by their reports, I’m not sure. Boerum Hill, the neighborhood Salim’s deli is in, is becoming one of the trendiest places to live in the whole city.
A few days pass, then a week. Then two weeks. Maybe this whole deli thing was just talk, I think. But Gab’s family isn’t like that. There’s no “blah blah blah,” as Kay would put it—“just do.” (Like her syntax in English, Kay’s life doesn’t have a conditional or subjunctive tense—only action.) And what about all the loans we’ve lined up, the credit cards we’ve taken out, the money that’s just sitting in our bank account?
Soon Gab and Kay have to start thinking about going back to the lives they left behind before we started the deli search. Gab, when she left her job as a corporate lawyer, was regularly putting in seventeen-hour days, and would sometimes sleep in a hotel next to her office rather than take a fifteen-minute cab ride home to Brooklyn. Kay had been halfheartedly taking classes at a community college so close to the barely cooled-off wreckage at Ground Zero that students wore face masks in class. Neither of them wants to go back.
Two weeks later Gab announces that she thinks we can make Salim’s deli work.
“But you said it was too small.”
“I didn’t say it was too small. I said it was small. What’s wrong with small? Are we such big people? When did we decide to open a Costco?” Small, she goes on, means that Salim’s deli is just right for our family, since we’re only aiming to run a modest business that will fulfill Kay and pay for her house, not make anyone rich. Small is perfect. Small means we won’t have to hire a big staff after the store gets on its feet and Gab and I aren’t working there anymore. Small means we won’t be taking an enormous risk with our savings. (“Maybe we can even cancel one of those credit cards I took out,” Gab says.) Small also means that Salim’s deli, though it is in a sexy, gentrifying neighborhood, is relatively cheap: one hundred and seventy thousand dollars with equipment and inventory included. The rent is a little high (thirty-five hundred a month), but for that little money overall we won’t find any other stores in Boerum Hill unless they have a hole in the ceiling.
Small is beautiful, Gab says. Small makes sense.
We decide to go back to the store on a weekday night. Part of me is intrigued, and part of me wants to make sure that Gab isn’t succumbing to desperation. She isn’t acting desperate—she’s thought about it for two weeks—but still, when you’re property-hunting and you’re running out of patience it’s easy to make bad decisions. New York in particular has a way of making people twist reality in their heads. Who cares if the apartment is beneath a flamenco studio? I’ll get used to the noise! Yeah, I know the whole apartment has only one window facing a brick wall, but I’m never at home during the day.
We arrive at eight o’clock in the evening on a bitterly windy night. Salim’s store is on Atlantic Avenue, the Broadway of